When I started the people were completely amazing - smart, passionate, ambitious. The culture is great, and I love that I get to work at a company that uses behavioral science to make the world better. You have to be type-A to do well at Opower, but if you fit the personality type, it can be really exciting. You will never be bored.

The company also cares deeply about what employees think - feedback (in aggregate) is taken very seriously. And Alex Laskey is wonderful! Does he still know everyone's name?

Cons

There are some serious gender bias issues. It often appears that men are promoted based on their potential (ex: I have a great idea) whereas women are promoted based on performance (ex: doing one job + another job and demonstrating that you're great at both, and having great ideas). As a woman, it's frustrating to look at people at the director level and higher. There are only a handful of women - this says to me that there's not much of a future here for me.

In the past year or so, many of the really amazing people have left. As we've grown many of the newer hires aren't quite as inspiring. Opower is a young company that has grown really quickly. So, there are a decent number of growing pains in figuring out how to increase efficiency, reduce redundancy, and maintain the culture. But we really need to figure it out. We need to make sure that the people who built this company feel that it's worth sticking around.

Advice to ManagementAdvice

I really love Opower, and so do most people who work here. I want Opower to be a leader in energy efficiency & behavioral science, but also as an employer. Make it worth staying here for a while through 1) compensation, 2) straight forward career trajectories, 3) manager improvement (or removing ineffective managers).